This is not the image a heartbeat. It’s the burst of energy of hundreds of tweets which are sent by the many ELT professionals participating in an online discussion called #ELTchat every Wednesday at two different times, at 12:00 p.m. GTM and  at 21:00 p.m. GMT.

http://archivist.visitmix.com/473f9c70/1/Volume

What is #ELTchat?

Every Wednesday at 12:00 p.m. GMT and 21:00 p.m. GMT, a great number of ELT teachers from all over the world log into their Twitter account and for one hour they hold an online discussion (chat) on a topic they have selected.

The conversations can be followed by following the #ELTchat hashtag (please read the last section if not sure what a hashtag is); so anyone who posts a comment, a link, a question, must put #ELTchat somewhere in their message (status update or tweet). This way everyone who follows this hashtag can see their tweets.

A good number of topics have already been discussed, from learner autonomy to using Web 2.0 tools, and the chat seems is very popular and attracts a great number of ELT teachers every week.

Anyone can join and comment or just follow the comments until they get used to the flow of the conversation and feel ready to add their own comments, responses to other colleagues or suggestions and links.

Number of tweets recorded on September 21, 2011

#ELTchat: a ready made PLN for ELT professionals

In the summer of 2010,  Shelly Terrell, Jason Renshaw, and, later, Berni Wall, Andy Chaplin and myself started discussing creating an #ELTchat, our vision was to create a communication channel which would allow teachers to:

• continue with their professional development using this freely available social network
• hold short and focused conversations
• share and learn from each other
• find a ready-made PLN for ELT professionals or expand their existing PLN

All five original instigators were in full agreement about wanting to

• maintain a record of transcripts for easy reference by participants and non-participants
• be open and democratic in the way topics are selected and voted on
• allow  participants to access their conversations and share them on their blogs in any way which the chats stimulated them to write on a topic as a follow-up to the scheduled chats
• encourage further engagement through reviews and interviews with participants
• share content freely on http://eltchat.com/
• spread the word and include colleagues from around the world whether experienced or new to the profession

A decision was made, via skype, twitter and e-mail and #ELTchat kicked off on the 15th of September 2010.  Meanwhile,@olafelch set up the blog which would house all the transcripts, reviews and much more, such as reviews and podcasts!

They can all be found on the  #ELTchat blog which you should bookmark now!

The Numbers!

Here is an overview of the volume of tweets at the time of writing this post and the engagement of various fellow #ELTchatters!  99,052  tweets! Amazing, isn’t it, in such a short time!

Obviously, as moderators, we tend to show higher numbers, but the #ELTchat timeline is alive all week long, not only on Wednesdays.  By now, it has come to be included as one of the standard hashtags added to updates connected to English Language Teaching on Twitter!

The Moderators 

Of the four oroginal moderators  working on #ELTchat every Wednesday, two had to stop moderating,  either for health reasons (@olafelch)  or because their work circumstances changed drastically (@englishraven) but we were very very fortunate to have great ELT colleagues step in and take their places

@Shaunwilde and @barbsaka – Shaun Wilden and Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto are the great new additiong to our team of modetarors

The Volunteers

But the moderators are not the only people actively involved in #ELTchats!

More recently, we have had started inviting guest moderators, experienced teachers,  teacher trainers and authors who can enrich our #ELTchat conversations and our first two guest moderators were:

• Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto (@barbsaka on Twitter) who is a well known ELT author and teacher trainer living in Japan  (Barbara has since become one of our moderators)
• Chuck Sandy (@chucksandy on Twitter) another well known ELT author also living and working in Japan

Since all moderators are also working people, we ourselves  cannot be online to moderate every single time.

On those occasions, whenever we have called upon colleagues online to help at the time, we have had fantastic responses and a great show of good moderation skills by #ELTchatters such as @esolcourses (Sue Lyon Jones), @bcnpaul1 ( Paul Braddock) and @ceciliaoelho (Cecilia Coelho).

It’s been great working with so many keen and talented colleagues!

How are #ELTchat topics chosen?

Every Saturday, one of the moderators  will ask teachers who follow #ELTchat to propose some topics for the next chats through a blog post is (here is an example) and the link is posted on Twitter and re-tweeted by all the moderators several times throughout Sunday.

#ELTchat followers – or anyone else, in fact – can go to that post and suggest topics in the comments under the blog post. Sometimes good suggestions for topics are suggested on Twitter itself!

Then on Sunday evening, the moderators look at the topics suggested, review them in case they have been covered before, sometimes edit and reword them slightly to make them more clearly focused and create an online poll such as this one which was used for the topics of our previous chat.

One hour before the 12:00 p.m.GMT chat begins, the poll closes automatically and the first or second topic (we alternate each week) is discussed during the one hour of the chat.

So how can you get involved too?

If you are not a Twitter user you need to know these basic facts about it:

• You need to create a Twitter account
• It’s important to identify yourself as a teacher; teachers like to follow other teachers!
• You can post status updates just like Facebook
• Your status updates cannot be longer than 140 characters
• You can follow anyone and they don’t need to follow you back
• You can follow any conversation that has a hashtag.

If you are new to Twitter, the concept of a hashtag may be alien to you. Don’t worry!

We’ve all been there as newbies on Twitter and it’s perfectly normal.

The best thing you can do if you are new to Twitter or even if you haven’t got a Twitter account, is to watch this great Teacher Training Video, An Introduction to Using Twitter , created by Russell Stannard,

And even if you are not a Twitter user, you can still view the conversation while it’s taking place on Twitter by searching for #ELTchat postings either on TweetGrid , What the Hashtag or on Tweetchat

What if you can’t follow ALL the #ELTchats?

After each chat, the transcript is posted on the #ELTchat blog and more recently, we have started asking fellow Twitterers for summaries and, would you know, we have had an enthusiastic response!

One or more of the chat participants, write up a summary of the main points and ideas that came up duing the chat and post them on their blog, or if they don’t have a blog, we post directly on the #ELTchat blog.

Here are some of thes summaries with name of contributor,  Twitter handle, and their blog link so you can follow them on Twitter and read their blogs.

• Sandy Millin  – @sandymillin –  Blog post:  Encouraging English in Teen Classrooms &  Convincing colleagues that online professional development (PD) is as effective as face-to-face (posted on the #ELTchat blog)
• Dave Dodgson – @DaveDodgson –  The role and function of humour in the EFL class: from “Ha, ha!” to “Aha!”
• Sue Annan  – @SueAnnan – To Test or not to Test? And if we don’t what then? – #ELTchat Summary 19/01/2011 (posted on the #ELTchat blog)
• Vicky Saumell – @vickysaumell  –  Teaching English through Songs (part 1 of 4)
• Fiona Mauchline –  @fionamau -  Using songs in the EFL/ESL classroom (posted on the #ELTchat blog
• Shaun Wilden – @shaunwilden –  Can translation (and translation tools) facilitate language learning and how can it be used to best effect
• Vladimira Michalkova – @vladkaslniecko –   Ways to develop learner autonomy – tips for learning outside class time

The #ELTchat blog  is fast becoming a wonderful and rich resource for ELT  teachers whether they join the chat or not. We were all very pleased when, as early as October 2010, #ELTchat was named as “Site of the Month” on http://www.tefl.net/ !

Who owns #ELTchat?

#ELTchat does not in fact belong to anyone. It was a concept that popped into different minds and the time was auspicious to start it, but it is not owned by the moderators – it is owned by everyone who participates and is engaged in the scheduled conversations every Wednesday!

We hope this will keep going as a collaborative project and effort which enriches its followers as well as its creators (!) with new ideas, many of which are simply born by the stimulating interaction and buzz which is created during the chat itself!

Oh! The tweets do come down fast and furious and fingers on keys catch fire during the one hour dedicated to these online discussions!

But it’s been a great trip so far and I have loved it just as much as I have loved getting teachers who were reluctant about even getting a Twitter account typing furiously every Wednesday and leaving each chat with expressions which show their enthusiasm, the great injection of energy, the inspiration it brings into their teaching and the great sense of being connected with colleagues on the same wavelength!

I rest my case.

If you have not joined by next week and are on line, you will be the one to miss out on a great opportunity. And life is too short to miss great stuff like #ELTchat!

A ready-made PLN for ELT professionals

Postscript 1

Luke Meddings thinks it IS the heartbeat of #ELTchat! I love that! Or maybe the heartbeat of ELT?

Postscript 2

What is a hashtag? A quick explanation before you watch Russell’s video

A hashtag is the symbol # before any word or abbreviation, which allows you to follow anyone in the world who puts the same hashtagged word or hashtagged abbreviation in their tweets.

Hashtagged comments on Twitter- called a backchannel – are very common during conferences/ talks/  presentations & workshops during which the audience as well as interested people who have not been able to attend, are able to post updates, comments, hold conversations while the even is on, and often continue the discussion and commenting on Twitter long after an event has finished.

Hashtagged chats or conversations are not new. Already a great number of different groups of educators hold regular discussions on topics of their choice on Twitter. Jerry Blumengarten, known to Twitter users as @cybraryman has compiled an excellent list of all the education focused chats with details of days, times and hashtags used here in his great internet cybrary! No wonder many teachers call Twitter their ‘global staffroom’ because they can share and exchange ideas 24/7 with like-minded educators from around the globe.

Related Blog posts

Twitter Chats for ESL/EFL Teachers and how to participate in them on LARRY FERLAZZO WEBSITES OF THE DAY blog. This post includes another two great links about how to participate in Twitter chats.

Tweet count on November 29, 2011

I have been playing with story animation tools for a long time, learning from colleagues’ blogs and links on Twitter.  Recent posts include Burcu Akyol’s  4-3-2-1 Action! Online Tools For Making Movies in the Language Classroom and Shelly Terrell’s presentation on Digital Storytelling which includes some excellent ideas. Here are a few additional ones, which you can use with technology as well as without technology.

Animations

“Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement.” (from Wikipedia)

If ‘rapid’ is a pre-condition, then I guess some of my examples aren’t real animations, but mere illustrations but I have decided to use the term ‘animating’ in the sense of ‘breathing life into a narrative’ by creating a picture story board with Web 2.0 or conventional tools.

In a lesson which some of my trainees created some years ago, in the absence of Web 2.0 tools, they created a great storyboard poster with character figures they could move at appropriate moments during the story-telling. Teachers of younger learners are sure to have used techniques such as this,  or flannelboards or flannelgraphs (as some call them) and, of course, magnetboards! But even your own board or IWB can serve as a fantastic backdrop for moving figures!

Here is my trainees’  lovely animation; Red Riding Hood and the wolf are movable characters:

I have chosen to stay with the James Thurber version of Little Red Riding Hood. I am very partial to this version written in 1932;  the wolf gets it at the end of the story, because, the moral goes, ”It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays”…. It’s a great story to use with adults, because many of its elements are reminiscent of the original fairy tale, which most of them will know, but it comes with a twist, a sting in the tail and the humour of it may appeal to some learners.

This is a text I have used in seminars for all sorts of sessions, from Running Dictations to learning how to make flowcharts (and other information transfer diagrams) for narratives.

You can view some interesting techniques on my Materials and Downloads page, where you can find and download the lesson plan written by one of my trainees and the beautiful materials collaboratively prepared by her teaching practice group. You can find it as one of the files I have uploaded in a ‘Box”. It’s called “The little Girl and the Wolf”.

This version of the story is, of course, not suited to using with young pupils, but you can very easily make the original story with a young class if you think it’s a story you want to work with…

Here is an animation of the same story I made with Creaza Cartoonist, chosen because it had the characters, backgrounds and images needed to create this animated story and was very easy to create. There are many other tools available and I intend to compare them in a later post, but for the time being, this was the one which had the characters I needed readily available.

Note: I used jing to screencast  both versions of my animated story because I must say that the cartoon created with Creaza is a bit unstable and sometimes you can see it and sometimes you can’t.

Some suggestions for activities with this story animation (and other story animations):

Reading

The students can be asked to do one or more of the following

• Read the actual story and compare with their own version
• Read the actual ending and compare to their own
• Reorder scrambled parts of the story first, then watch animation with or without voiceover and confirm or correct, e.g.

Listening

You can do one or more of the following:

• Give the students parts of the story (as above) to memorize and then recite their parts and put story in order; later they can assign their sentences to cartoon slides
• Dictate story as a dictogloss (or dictocomp, as I first learnt to call this activity) – this is an activity integrated with writing
• Read out the story with some mistakes while the students follow animation and ask them to spot your mistakes (of fact or added detail, not grammar or other mistakes) or use recording – the one I made below was with Jing but if you can use other tools you could also add some background sounds.

Writing

• Write their own narrative after viewing all the slides or all but the last three
• Write what the characters are saying and what they are thinking
• Supply the ending (if you have kept the last few lines back!)
• Rewrite the story from the point of view of the wolf or the grandmother

Speaking

The students can be asked to:

• Create a conversation between the characters in each slide – roleplay each scene while the teacher is projecting the slides
• Record the conversation with a screencast tool like Jing or Screenjelly and post on a school blog
• Narrate the story as told in the pictures – listen to all stories and vote for best or closest to original
• Get groups to retell and insert some “lies” in the story – other groups listen and spot the lies
• The message of the story (the moral here, for example) can be discussed to encourage opinion sharing

Integrating the various skills

You can do one or more of the following

• Encourage students to collaborate and say/write their own fairy tale; help them create their own animation of the story with dialogue bubbles, or voice-over narration using a screencast application
• Allow Ss to edit your own story animation and create one of their own with a different ending, perhaps even the original, then narrate orally.
• Students can create a new animation in which they change a well known fairy-tale and give it a new ending. or
• Students can create a modern day version of a children’s fairy tale, e.g. Cinderella, or a movie they watched and liked, or a song that has a story, e.g. “She’s Leaving Home” by the Beatles.

Narratives are very powerful tools as the activities they can generate do not limit themselves to just what happens in the story but they can very easily lend themselves to all sorts of activities which use the story as an inspiration or a springboard.

Typical activities include

• Writing a journal
• Turning a story into verse
• Writing legal documents the characters may have received or sent
• Turning a story into drama, a mini-play and then creating an animation

N.B. This post needs finishing and updating when my arm is back in synch.

For the time being this will have to do because I don’t see myself being able to write much before  mid November.

Please comment &/or add links to your own blog posts in which you have used story animation tools. I would really love to read them

Related Links

The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling page – University of Houston

Key Digital Storytelling websites

Digital Storytelling a page by Shambles Guru

Stories Come Alive a Wiki by Traci Blazoski

kapitzvirt

Well, thank you to all who came to this webinar and sorry slides were rather unruly; here they are. kapitzvirt

Since the  Teaching Languages in a Virtual World Ning will soon be closing down, I have saved the posts related to some teaching experiences in Second Life here on this blog – mainly for the memory and some really interesting discussions following each post.

You will be able to read them by downloading the pdf copy which I have uploaded into by materials box from box.net

• My first lesson in Second Life
• A visit to Denmark
• Burning up in Second Life

All the rest of the resources of this ning have now been moved to a wiki here.

I have saved the posts, not because I think they are all that significant, but they do remind me of that great course which I encourage you to follow next year.

I loved my birthday wishes this year! Thanks to Shelly Terrell who was the instigator, my PLN gave me this wonderful memory of this special birthday.

I was so thrilled at your words, music, images and thoughts that I wanted to save them all here and come back and look at them all again and again. Thank you all so very much, my Twitter friends. You made me very very happy.

Thank you to my Facebook friends, too, whose wishes I could not show here but which I have also saved and will treasure as a bright, bright memory!

Thank you all!

Marisa

Attn! Post continued below birthday wallwisher

And while you’re at it, of course, do have a look at this wonderful tool, the Wallwisher, which is so versatile and can be used for a class event, a class project apart from making someone’s birthday very special!

Here is another example of a Wallwisher I created after a talk to allow participants to access some of the tools I used.

And here is one more, which I would like you to visit and add ideas on how you could use wallwishers with your classes!

Related Blog Post

Wallwishers-105 Classroom ideas by Sean Banville